Obligatory Weinergate Post

Queens congressman runs into some trouble on the Twitter

There is a supplementary joke embedded within Rachel Shteir’s excellent article, today in Tablet Magazine, about the Jewish political consultant played by Alan Cumming on the acclaimed TV series The Good Wife. Describing the wheeling-and-dealing, brilliant New York political consultant Eli Gold (purportedly based, loosely, on Rahm Emanuel), Shteir writes, “He’s everything Anthony Weiner dreams about at night.”

Well. For those who don’t know, there was a flap over the weekend in which a picture of a man’s crotch was tweeted by Weiner’s account at (“@”) a young female follower of the Democratic congressman from Queens. Weiner claims his account was hacked; some have intimated that, in fact, Weiner—who is married to former Hillary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin—may have intended to send a private direct message to the follower and instead accidentally tweeted the image to the world. (Ben Smith lays out the various possibilities; even those readers who are not on Twitter will have some idea of what may have gone down.)

The world may never know for sure whether Weiner is the victim here or not (although if I were a betting man, I’d wager we will know, sooner or later). But in the meantime, can we expect a similar scandal in The Good Wife, Season Three?

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I don’t think Anthony Weiner has ever had a job in the real world in his life, and he can’t be happy about the prospect of trying to find one. His press conference was a nasty display of petulance, unwarranted by the legitimate prodding of reporters, and that alone ought to end his career.

A.says:

June 2, 2011 - 2:44 am

No mention of Andrew Brietbart, the man who smeared Shirley Sherrod and is now attempting the same thing with Anthony Weiner? No mention of what he’s clarified in his interviews today. No mention that the woman in question never received the tweet and gave a lengthy statement to The NY Daily News that the person on twitter who “caught” this tweet had been harassing her for months. And no mention of the person on twitter tweeting that this scandal would happen months before it did. It’s so much better to make vague accusations of guilt. This is a really sloppy post.

Anthony Weiner is from Brooklyn. He represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

You can see just one of the theories of how his twitter was hacked on this other blog post:

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